The Role of Hosting Speed in Reducing Bounce Rates for Online Stores

As page load time goes from one to three seconds, bounce rates increase by 32%. Servers with low latency and high processing power serve website data more quickly, and ones closer to the store’s customers reduce data travel time. Load balancing increases speed by distributing traffic.

As of 2024, e-commerce website bounce rates range from 30% to 55%. The average rate depends on the industry and the source of the traffic. Food and drinks (65.5%), books and media (55.86%), and pet care stores (57.93%) have some of the highest bounce rates. There’s a lot of online stores can do: try to improve the user experience, customize their offerings, etc., but one notoriously overlooked cause of bounce rates is the website’s speed. 

What determines website speed?

Server and hosting quality are the primary factors that influence website speed. Servers with low latency and high processing power can serve website data faster. Shared hosting is slower than other types due to multiple websites sharing the same resources.

Server location is an additional factor. Servers closer to the store’s target audience reduce data travel time, speeding up the website. If your store primarily caters to the US market, consider a hosting provider with servers in the US or Canada. 

Does the web host determine the server speed?

The host does not determine it, but they play a significant role. The best web hosting providers choose servers equipped with modern processors and sufficient RAM to handle multiple requests efficiently. E-commerce platforms tend to be resource-intensive, so at least 4GB RAM with VPS hosting is recommended, ideally closer to 8GB. 

Hard disk drives can copy at 30-150 MB per second (MB/s) when moving large files, while standard solid-state drives do so at 500 MB/s. Modern NVMe SSDs can achieve as much as 3,500 MB/s.

Good hosting companies use load balancing to distribute traffic efficiently, preventing slowdowns during high demand. 

Hosts that run LiteSpeed, Nginx, or other optimized server software handle requests faster than default configurations. Modern HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 protocols improve speed by enabling parallel data transfers and reducing latency.

Some hosts provide built-in caching tools such as LiteSpeed Cache to speed up page delivery.

Downtime or server overload can affect speed significantly. Hosts with strong uptime guarantees (at least 99.9%) ensure satisfactory performance.

A visitor is far more likely to bounce when a web page takes more than a few seconds to load. Specifically, Google found that the bounce probability grows by 32% as the time it takes to load a page increases from one to three seconds. An extra second of loading time can make the difference between a higher bounce rate and 20% more conversions. 

Why do we bounce from slow sites? 

People’s perception of time depends on their location, age, emotions, and various external stimuli, among other factors. Unsurprisingly, this inconsistency manifests itself in online experiences. On average, internet users perceive loading times as being 15% slower than they really are. When recalling their browsing experience, they claim loading times were even lower – 35% slower than they were.

Continuing with false perceptions, the average person believes they waste nine minutes a day waiting for web pages to load. This is equivalent to two days a year. Indicators like progress bars and spinners can mislead visitors into believing that web pages are as much as 10% faster than they really are. 

Perhaps most importantly, the way an experience ends has a disproportionate impact on perception. Suppose the e-commerce site was relatively fast throughout most of the prospective buyer’s journey but became slow at checkout. In that case, they may navigate away feeling it was much slower than it actually was or that it was slow the whole time. What’s more, waiting more than two seconds hurts productivity and breaks concentration. 

Recap 

• The best hosts choose modern processors and sufficient RAM to handle multiple requests 
• Optimized server software handles requests faster than default configurations
• Built-in caching tools speed up page delivery
• An extra second means the difference between bouncing and conversion
• We perceive load times as being 15% slower than they are 
• Waiting for more than 2 seconds breaks concentration